AILES REPORTEDLY REGRETS COMMENTS ABOUT NEW YORK TIMES

Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes regrets his choice of words at Ohio University last Monday when he referred to New York Times reporters as “a bunch of lying scum,” media reporter Howard Kurtz wrote today (Wednesday) in TheDailyBeast.com. Kurtz, who remarked that Ailes’s words amounted to “a pretty sweeping indictment of a top newspaper, even by Ailes’s blunt standards,” cited an unnamed senior Fox News executive as saying that Ailes realizes he went too far and regrets using that language. The executive went on to say that Ailes actually believes that the Times has been fair to Fox and that he respects the newspaper’s new executive editor, Jill Abramson. Kurtz speculated that Ailes continues to be angry over a story by reporter Russ Buettner, published last year, which claimed that he had told former HarperCollins publisher Judith Regan to lie about her relationship with former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik. Although the article noted that Regan had denied that Ailes had given her such instructions, it continues to rankle the Fox News chief, Kurtz suggested. “Ailes clearly hasn’t forgotten,” the columnist concluded, “but he erred in aiming his rough language at the more than 1,200 journalists at the New York Times. Now, the day after, he’s trying to walk it back.”